Fruit trees on Mantri campus

Former Association chief, Mr Giri Sundaram, and I have this thing in common -  we both are  kinda  nutty when it comes to tree planting.  Months before he became the prez  Mr Sundaram and his wife Revathy joined us in planting trees on Visitors parking lot outside Mantri gates. The Sundarams have an eye for plants, and they can identify most of them. The sapling Mantri's Santa Claus planted  last Christmas was identified  for us by Mr Sundaram. In case you are not familiar, the tall plant coming up on  the Seniors Area lawn is Nagapushpum.

When four of us - Pandey, Rahul, Sourav and I - as founding members of our short-lived Sunday Santhai initiative, hit upon an idea to plant trees on the lawns by the clubhouse swim pool Mr Sundaram not only welcomed the idea, but also suggested we plant fruits saplings that would benefit Mantri's children and their children for decades to come.  He planted a mango, and we have, growing on the lawns by the swim-pool, a guava, a sapota plant and another mango, planted to celebrate Advik,  the second child born at Mantri's to the Ramkumars of H block. Sourav and Rahul scouted for nurseries on ECR to fetch the fruits saplings, hybrid.

Ms Indumathi, former treasurer, planting a guava.

Now that we have a new association management in place, it is time we celebrated their term in office with community tree-planting. In an earlier post, announcing a new team at Mantri's, we suggested that all 20 elected mananging committee members consider planting a sapling each, in two rows along the front-side park, so that we have some shade on the driveway on either side of the park. Would appreciate,  if the Association acts on our suggestion at the earliest, before the end of the current monsoon days.

In case we go for fruit trees, instead of Neem, on  Mantri driveway,  we could get in touch with Prof. Ramasamy of LIBA on the Loyola college campus.  He leads a volunteers group engaged in distribution of saplings of fruit-bearing trees to whoever wants to plant them on their premises. You can read about them in The Hindu. The non-profit group - IIIBFT is also on Facebook.